View full sizeTorsten Kjellstrand/The OregonianOregon Ballet Theatre dancer Alison Roper is lifted my men of the company during a recent studio rehearsal for the world premiere of "The Stravinsky Project."

When Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was working in France in the creative heyday of the early 20th century, he would regularly combine forces with artistic revolutionaries who helped change his outlook on music, art and the larger world. Among his circle were luminaries including filmmaker and Renaissance man Jean Cocteau, modern painter Pablo Picasso, and, most notably, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev and choreographer George Balanchine, with whom he created startlingly modern works that forever changed ballet.

Given his collaborative history, chances are good that Stravinsky would have liked what's going on in the studios of Oregon Ballet Theatre this month, where four diverse local choreographers have created "The Stravinsky Project," a new dance set to some of his lesser-known piano pieces. The work is the focal point of OBT's winter program, which opens a four-performance run Saturday and also features two iconic Stravinsky ballets, "The Rite of Spring" and "Firebird."

"The music was the one thing that brought us all together," says Rachel Tess of the Portland/Sweden-based Rumpus Room Dance, who jointly choreographed the ballet with OBT principal dancer Anne Mueller and Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland of BodyVox. "It can be challenging when you're collaborating if you don't have one idea to hang onto. The one idea here was Stravinsky."

The Stravinsky Project

What: A world-premiere ballet presented by Oregon Ballet Theatre, along with two other ballets featuring music by Igor Stravinsky

The new ballet explores themes of anxiety and duality, as well as the classic Stravinsky battlefield of man versus nature. The work is split into three distinct segments, with the actual performance beginning in the Keller Auditorium lobby during the evening's first intermission, with dancers improvising on platforms while people juggle drinks or race to the restrooms. The work then moves to the stage with visual echoes of the lobby prologue. Tess and Mueller each take charge of one segment, with Hampton and Roland, a husband-and-wife team with a long history of creating dance together, creating the work's finale together.

Hampton says that when artistic director Christopher Stowell pulled together the "Stravinsky Project" collaborators, he was looking for choreographers who didn't have an entirely shared idiom.

"The three teams are compatible but vastly different in their approach," Hampton says. "If you chose choreographers who all did the same kind of stuff, it would be like, 'Why would you do that?' He wanted to find people who would approach the piece quite differently."

Breaking the piece up into distinct 10-minute segments plays into each choreographer's strengths, Hampton says. Tess' segment is about abstraction and confusion. Mueller's is about formality and architecture. And his and Roland's is about identity and personal demons.

Mueller says figuring out how to break up the ballet came around naturally, without any diva-turns or drama.

"We all had a strong impulse about where the right place for each one of us was from the beginning," she says. "That was a relief."

Dancing to music as complicated and algebraic as Stravinsky's presents a myriad of problems. For starters: counting.

"It can be really challenging to get your dancers to perform on the right counts," Roland says. "It can be daunting to approach something where you can't hear the counts and they're constantly changing.

"But the good thing about Stravinsky, though, is his pieces are so colorful. You can grab onto one passage and get the flavor and the arc of that color, and then hear the next one coming and jump onto that. You don't have to work so much with the measures of the music."

View full sizeTorsten Kjellstrand/The OregonianDancer Candace Bouchard is one of the alter-egos at the center of "The Stravinsky Project," which explores themes of duality and nature.

Because these are disparate pieces of Stravinsky, they're bridged by new ambient and electronic music by composer Heather Perkins, who says she incorporated sounds such as flowing water and audience whispers to subtly underscore the work's themes.

"I like how the sound of people talking can be white noise like the sound of water or wind," she says.

Another other-worldly element of "The Stravinsky Project" comes from the enigmatic costume design by artist Morgan Walker, a painter and faculty member at Pacific Northwest College of Art. He's given some of the dancers black, skin-tight jumpsuits with designs pulled from wood-block prints that evoke retro sci-fi imagery of superheroes and space aliens. The look evolved as Walker got more and more into the music, and ended up providing the context for the lead roles, polar opposites danced by Alison Roper and Candace Bouchard.

"I started drawing and thinking about Stravinsky," he says. "I started to think about Diaghilev and the revolutionary things he was doing back in the day. By thinking about that, it helped me get some structure of two characters and the idea of duality."

Walker says he drew extensively, coming up with design after design, way more than could ever be incorporated into the final dance.

"I can't tell you how much I've loved this, but it's also been crazy for me," he says. "I'm used to making all the decisions myself. I sit in a studio and paint, and I never let anyone come look at what I'm doing. For every one thing that we've used here, there are 10 or 15 other things I came up with. I even have a couple of paintings started that are based on rejected ideas from 'The Stravinsky Project.'"

Art begets art. Again, Stravinsky would probably approve.

For Mueller, getting the chance to choreograph a new work was particularly important as she segues into the next stage of her ballet career. At the end of this season she'll retire from dancing after 15 years with the company, moving into an administrative job as OBT's artistic coordinator.

"Unlike a visual artist or a composer, who can work alone, you have to have the bodies to hone the craft of choreography," she says. "That's a logistically challenging thing to do because it's so difficult to be given these experiences. To get to do this with these dancers is an incredible opportunity for me."

And because Mueller's performed with these dancers for years, it was easier for her step into the new role.

"They're such awesome dancers, and I've been champing at the bit to get to work with them in the studio," she says. "They give me a great level of respect. They don't treat me like I'm someone off the street."